Ask HN: How do you search for low level content nowadays?

2 points by khaled_ismaeel 1 year ago | 5 comments

Recently I've been messing around x86-64 assembly for fun. I can't help but notice that searching for relevant information online is much harder now that it was 10 years ago when I started with programming. It could be related to my particular topic, or I'm just getting old, but bare with me.

Yes, SEO is a major reason for it; ad-infested and LLM-generated pages rank very high in search results. But even if I work around those (with Kagi, for example), it's harder still: Searching things like x86-64, POSIX, ABI's, etc, rarely yields results for me. Authoritative content is thin and spread out across disparate man-pages. Some things are left out completely undocumented. LLM's seems especially helpless dealing with low level topics.

A large portion of this field feels like folklore knowledge, and I didn't even get outside x86-64 on Linux; I can imagine it's much less approachable in the embedded world.

Can you relate? How do you deal with it?

drweevil 1 year ago |

One way I've dealt with this is to identify books on the topic. I'll search on DuckDuckGo, Amazon, Archive.org (where you might even find a pdf), etc. If I can find one that suits I'll buy a used (hopefully inexpensive) copy, if possible.

JohnFen 1 year ago | |

This is what I do as well. The internet is ephemeral, but books are (practically) forever.

sandwichsphinx 1 year ago |

I noticed the same thing, especially with many of those old authoritative sources that seem to have disappeared or suffered from link rot. It reminds me a lot of the movie Soylent Green, where basic repairs had to be done custom because there were no replacements. Outside of academic journals and printed books, I don’t bother searching for information because it’s just not worth the effort given how hard it is to find reliable sources. The only way I’ve been dealing with this is by relearning my fundamentals. There are only so many ways hardware and software can be designed correctly, so I rely on recurring patterns, motifs, improving my reverse engineering skills, and adopting a clean-room design approach.

not_your_vase 1 year ago |

1. I rely more and more on official documentation alone, and the code itself, especially since SO went down the toilet.

2. Sometimes Copilot is actually useful. E.g. Zephyr frameworks[0] documentation is quite a hit and miss, and it's code is... well... it's a lot, made by a million people and it shows. When asking for example code for some arcane option, I found it frequently useful (something which I hate to admit).

[0] - okay, maybe Zephyr is not on the same low level as ASM, but you get the idea

not_your_vase 1 year ago | |

I have read the last part of the question way too late, so I guess now I look like a fool for mentioning copilot. Oh, well. That's what I deserve it for not being an attentive reader.